March 23, 2004

The Dawn of the Dead/Passion of the Christ Joke. I predicted here that Jon Stewart would go for the ready-made joke about Dawn of the Dead getting the better of The Passion of the Christ at the box office over the weekend. And that it would be "carefully crafted." That is, he wouldn't pass up the material, but he also wouldn't be offensive. The Daily Show writers would wield their great writing skills to surgically extract the usable joke. Here it is:

The Passion of the Christ, after three weekends, got knocked out of the number one movie in America slot. The honor now belongs to: Dawn of the Dead. What it says is this. While Americans enjoy a good resurrection movie, a good movie about one man who rises from the grave, what America has said is: the more people rising from the grave, the better. So that’s really the issue here. It wasn’t the story about religion and its glory. It’s really just dead people coming to life—whether they heal the sick … or eat brains.

Well done! The key was to make it into a joke about how crass our interests are, which really could even have worked as an idea for a sermon.